Musical.ly, the teen sensation, is no more. The app that was acquired by Chinese company ByteDance has now been absorbed into its TikTok app.
Once described as the “sexiest social media app that will revolutionize social media,” Musical.ly is no more. Users of the app woke up to a surprise as they found out their favorite app had been replaced with a new logo and name: “Welcome to TikTok, where every second counts.”
TikTok is not a new app. It is the star app of ByteDance, the Chinese company which acquired Musical.ly last November. And today, as part of their strategy to break into the US market, ByteDance decided to absorb Musical.ly and rebrand it as TikTok. Existing Musical.ly users have been automatically migrated over to their new TikTok accounts.
TikTok and Musical.ly are very similar in terms of core feature: short-form videos of up to 15 seconds. But that is also where the comparison stops. Time will tell if ex-Musical.ly users will take the change positively and stick around with TikTok.
Musical.ly, which was particularly popular in the US, had around 100 million users, while TikTok, created in 2016, claims over 500 million MAUs worldwide, minus China, where the company operates sister app Douyin which counts around 300 million monthly active users, exclusively in China.
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